Monitoring the world's growing volume of surveillance video is becoming prohibitively costly and increasingly error prone. Millions of surveillance and web cameras around the world are generating video and other visual data faster than it can be manually assessed. For this reason target identification and video summarization technologies are of growing importance. These systems produce summarized videos in various ways, generally with the aim of automatically presenting the interesting, salient or important content to the user more quickly than this content could be found by watching all the video linearly.
Current video summarization techniques broadly span two categories: key-frame based, which attempt to discover salient key-frames for summarization as a storyboard [1,2], and object track based, which attempt to non-chronologically blend multiple object tracks into a single frame to compress the total length of video [3,4,5]. Prior summarization systems [1,2,3,4,5], have two key limitations: (i) They typically summarize based on low-level signal features such as foreground motion, object detections, and bounding box geometry. However due to the semantic gap in video data, low-level signal (imagery) feature statistics do not necessarily correspond to salient/relevant content of semantic interest. (ii) Moreover, they typically only summarize within one camera view, whereas most contemporary surveillance systems have many disjoint camera views surveying a wide area of spaces. Critically, it is unclear how to summarize semantically multi-camera (and multi-location) holistic visualisation data in a sensible and coherent way.
As well as summarizing video feeds to reduce the review effort, there is also required a method and system for identifying particular objects (especially people) within large sets of visual data, such as that generated by multiple video cameras. However, current systems and methods require improvements in such processing, reviewing and filtering techniques.
Therefore, there is required a method and system that overcomes these problems.